If you wait long enough, a bad penny turns up. I just learned that Steve “Moorgard” Danuser has completed time off from working on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and taken a role with Epic Games on their popular Fortnite game. Danuser filled in for Chris Metzen and created much of the main narrative for World of Warcraft expansions such as Shadowlands, and Dragonflight.
WoW fans do not suffer fools gladly. Throughout his tenure at Blizzard, they were not kind to Danuser and blamed him for many of the lore problems in the past few expansions. Under Danuser’s reign, WoW became more “inclusive” and feminized which alienated loyal players. Fans accused him of poor character development, inconsistent plots, and narrative direction that lacked cohesion with established WoW lore.
His partner in crime former ex-Blizzard LGBTQ adjacent developer Johnny Cash is also now working at Epic as a quest designer for Fortnite. Danuser’s long-time friend and co-worker Ryan “Blackguard” Shwayder also works at Epic as a Game Director. The Three Amigos are reunited once again.
While working in the SoCal ideological bubble during the zenith of wokeness and DEI madness, Danuser was infamous for performative virtue signaling and pandering to far-left radical causes by promoting gender dysphoria AKA transgenderism in the plot line of WoW. Given his propensity to kowtow to the LGBTQ agenda, he will be a perfect fit at Epic as Fortnite has featured many overtures to various woke causes.
Conclusion
The video game industry is rife with nepotism, cronyism, imposters, and hucksters. I believe Danuser was over in over his head when he was at Blizzard. For years he was coddled by Curt Schilling at 38 Studios during pre-production on the ill-fated Copernicus MMORPG. He had no real track record of notable accomplishments before coming into Blizzard. He should hang his head in shame for how he sold his soul and brazenly promoted LGBTQ idealogy while working on WoW.
Under the misguided Mike Morhaime and J. Allan Brack’s leadership, while Blizzard was hiring talentedless pink-coiffed non-binary malcontents, it was simultaneously purging talented old-school white male devs from its ranks. Blizzard got what it deserved and then some.
After two straight expansions of declining WoW subscriber numbers, the writing was on the for Danuser. He finally left Blizzard in November 2023 to the delight of many WoW players. Chris Metzen returned to Blizzard the same month. While I am speculating here, I believe he was terminated because he was redundant. It’s obvious that Steve Danuser is no Chris Metzen.
Working at Epic is the perfect place for Danuser as he will be free to promote woke causes all he wants to the sophomoric Fortnite demographic.
–Wolfhsead
Wow, this is three, if not four times amazing! But also sad proof how the games industry is not based on merit and talent. Large studios tend to suck in such people.
These three have so much in common, not just visually over time looking at their profile photos and where they worked. Woke imposters, all of them. The fourth amazing thing is that Fortnite is still going strong.
I cannot comment on Fortnite. Never played and NEVER understood the appeal. Seems my gaming time is over, I so-so can live with all that survival game stuff, sometimes its still nice, but all that survival-minecraft-shooter and woke looks and design… I wondered years ago and still wonder why Fortnite is such a success. In AI times I asked several AIs to explain to me the success of Fortnite.
It is made for a crowd I don’t want to belong to. They seem at least not as crazy woke as Blizzard’s Overwatch (2).
I worry for future gamers. They are raised on a steady diet of… this. Politely phrased without going in detail.
LGBTQ activist Johnny Cash got hired because his father worked at Blizzard. Danuser and Shwayder both had blogs and parlayed that into jobs with SOE working as community reps for EQ. Then they got hired by Curt Schilling at 38 Studios for the failed MMO project. Danuser got hired at SOE to work on EQ Next. Then they ended up at Blizzard working on WoW.
The entire industry is populated with mid-wits i.e. the same small incestuous talent pool which is continually recycled.
The faster the AAA video industry dies, the better for gamers.